mr-damon/ecology

When animals and plants die, they decompose and become nutrients for new forms of life. Why should we deny ourselves of Mother Earth's beautiful cycle? Modern cemeteries separate the deceased from natural cycles by embalming them in toxic chemicals, boxing them in steel caskets and concrete burial vaults, and drenching the funeral grounds with pesticides.

Natural cemeteries are resisting these modern trends by bringing back simpler and traditional 'dust to dust' burials. These sites do not permit embalming, or caskets made of steel or precious hardwoods like rainforest woods. Instead people are buried closer to the earth, inside shrouds, cardboard or pine coffins. The body's decomposition can therefore nourish the earth, creating nutrient-rich soil for trees, wildflowers, and native vegetation. Instead of large headstones, the graves are marked with small fieldstones or with native trees or bushes. Grave sights are plotted with GPS to make sure loved ones can always find the proper sight if the natural landscape eventually grows to look entirely different.

Climate models predicted it wouldn't happen until the end of the century.

So a team led by Seattle researchers was stunned to discover that vast swaths of acidified seawater already are showing up along the Pacific Coast as greenhouse-gas emissions upset the oceans' chemical balance.

In surveys from Vancouver Island to the tip of Baja California, reported Thursday in the online journal Science Express, the scientists found the first evidence that large amounts of corrosive water are reaching the continental shelf -- the shallow sea margin where most marine creatures live.

"The Toolbox for Sustainable City Living is a DIY guide for creating locally-based, ecologically sustainable communities in today's cities. Its straightforward text, vibrant illustrations and accessible diagrams explain how urbanites can have local access and control over life's essential resources: food production, water security, waste management, autonomous energy, and bioremediation of toxic soils. Written for people with limited financial means, the book emphasizes building these systems with cheap, salvaged and recycled materials when possible. This book will be an essential tool for transitioning into a sustainable future threatened by the converging trends of global warming and energy depletion."

Although gardeners might believe that when they plant a butterfly bush, native to China, they are helping butterflies, they are merely attracting the adults who sip the nectar. The plant cannot be eaten by the butterfly larvae.

Even a lowly fly maggot, which lives inside the hard round galls often seen on the stems of goldenrod, has an important place in the ecosystem. "Fly maggots are really high in proteins and fats, and chickadees love them," Mr. Tallamy said. "We give chickadees seeds, but when they get one of those maggots, they can really make it through the cold winter night."

So if you cut down the goldenrod, the wild black cherry, the milkweed and other natives, you eliminate the larvae, and starve the birds. This simple revelation about the food web -- and it is an intricate web, not a chain -- is the driving force in "Bringing Nature Home."

The book evolved out of a set of principles that Mr. Tallamy jotted down at the request of students at the University of Delaware, and of gardeners attending his public lectures.

They all wanted lists of plants: what attracted what, which was then eaten by what, and so on. So he began to map a food web for the suburban or urban backyard.

The typical garden might hold weeping cherries and rhododendrons, lilacs and crape myrtles. That is beautiful, perhaps, but it's a barren wasteland to native insects and thus birds.

Almost all North American birds other than seabirds -- 96 percent -- feed their young with insects, which contain more protein than beef, he writes.

He cites the work of Michael Rosenzweig, an evolutionary biologist based at the University of Arizona, who has analyzed data from all over the world and found a one-to-one correspondence between habitat destruction and species loss. In Delaware, for instance, state ecologists say that 40 percent of all native plant species identified in 1966 are threatened or extinct; 41 percent of native birds that depend on forest cover are rare or absent.

So the message is loud and clear: gardeners could slow the rate of extinction by planting natives in their yards. In the northeast, a patch of violets will feed fritillary caterpillars. A patch of phlox could support eight species of butterflies. The buttonbush shrub, which has little white flowers, feeds 18 species of butterflies and moths; and blueberry bushes, which support 288 species of moths and butterflies, thrive in big pots on a terrace. (Appropriate species for other regions are listed by local native plant societies.)

You don't have to cut down the lilacs, but they are doing nothing for the insects and birds. "It's as if they were plastic," Mr. Tallamy said. "They're not hurting anything, except that they're taking space away from something that could be productive."

"What the report establishes is that the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is already above the threshold that can potentially cause dangerous climate change," Flannery told the broadcaster late Monday. "We are already at great risk of dangerous climate change, that's what these figures say. It's not next year or next decade, it's now."